


A Wish Is A Dream Your Heart Makes

by Angel Ascending (angel_in_ink)



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Feels, Gen, Light Angst, Possible Comfort of a Sort, Spoilers for All of Campaign One Including the Dalen's Closet One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-04
Updated: 2019-09-04
Packaged: 2020-10-06 21:06:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20513486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angel_in_ink/pseuds/Angel%20Ascending
Summary: Everything changes. That was true for both gods and mortals, and it was true for Vax’ildan Vessar, Eternal Champion of the Raven Queen.





	A Wish Is A Dream Your Heart Makes

**Author's Note:**

> All dialogue from the wedding taken from the Dalen's Closet one-shot.
> 
> This isn't a fix-it fic, and I'm not sure it's an emotional hurt/comfort fic either. It is itself.

Everything changes. That was true for both gods and mortals, and it was true for Vax’ildan Vessar, Eternal Champion of the Raven Queen. He wondered, back when he had first arrived, if the changes would have been easier on him if he had been truly dead when he had entered Her realm and Her service in full, instead of coming to her with both spirit and the body bound to it. Would the chill of her halls burned him less? Would that last, full beat of his heart frightened him so? He had still felt fear in those first early moments, still felt pain, though both had faded quickly, along with his curiosity.

Some things hadn’t faded. Some things had grown, like the wings on his back, no longer part of the armor, but part of him instead. Like the tattoo on his arm, ink and love transformed into clean, white bone, growing up and out of his skin like the plants he had tended with Keyleth in Zephrah during that one, beautiful year together. Love, his love for Keyleth, for his sister, for his found family and his friends, that still lit the interiors of his silent heart even when other emotions faded and were lost.

The realm of the Raven Queen was quiet and cold, eternal twilight streaking the sky purple and gray, the only sounds the creaking of bare branches in empty orchards and the caws and chuckles of ravens. The Raven Queen’s voice, when she spoke to Vax’ildan, carried no echoes, displaced no air. When Vax’ildan had first spoken, before his Queen had blessed him with the silent voice of the dead, the life in his voice had echoed off the stones, causing the ravens to shriek, disturbing the slumbering dead, disrupting their perfect dreams.

Sometimes, in those moments when his duties had been seen to, when his Queen did not wish to have him by Her side, Vax’ildan would walk the empty orchards, past the trees with their branches as bare and white as bleached bone, past the ravens who chuckled and croaked and clacked their beaks at him. He would walk until the silver mists began to roll over his feet, walk until the fog enveloped him utterly, walk until the light around him turned golden and soft and familiar, until he stood in front of his mother again, in front of the house he had shared with her and his sister. His form during those times was shaped both by her memory and his, sometimes a young boy, other times the young man he had been in life. Always she would hug him, just as she had when he had crossed over, and tell him how proud she was of him.

Vax’ildan could not materialize onto the Material Plane in his human form without the leave of his Queen, but that did not stop him from visiting his family, his friends. Keyleth never spoke to the raven that visited her every day. If she had, she would have learned that they weren’t _always_ the same raven, that sometimes it was him that she was giving head skritches and feeding scraps of cheese to. He was glad of that, honestly, that she didn’t know. He knew her as well as he knew his own heart, knew her grief would be long enough without his occasional presence. In truth, sending the ravens to visit her might have been a selfish act, even if he had meant well by it. He hadn’t been a perfect man in life. His passing had not changed that.

The night his niece was born Vax’ildan was there as well, though no one noticed the raven perched on the windowsill, not when so much else had been going on. There had been blood and screaming enough for a battle, but at the end of it all there had been a new life cradled in Vex’s arms. He had watched from his perch as Vex held her daughter, as Percy had held both of them, and oh, oh how he had wished—

Scanlan’s Wish had rung through the realms like a bell being struck and for a moment Vax’ildan hadn’t been able to make sense of the words that had been spoken for the noise and power that the magic had carried. “I wish that Vax’ildan could say a few words at his sister’s wedding.”

A wedding. He had not been invited to the first, a quick ceremony that had taken place almost but not quite on impulse. That had stung a little at the time, but that pain had faded even before the end had come for him. A wedding.

Vax’ildan feels his Queen’s regard upon him and is not surprised when he looks up and sees the mask that is Her face, white as the moon which does not shine where he is. He was wearing his own mask as well, dark and feathered and beaked.

_Would you go?_ Her words were wind in the branches, the movement of threads in a loom.

_Yes_, Vax’ildan replied, his word the ruffling of feathers, the creaking of leather, as soft as the dead whispering in their graves. _If you would allow me._

In answer, She opened Her shadowed mantle wide. Vax’ildan stepped through it, just as he had when he had first passed through the mortal plane into his Queen’s realm the first time. He had come back several times as a raven, but this was his first time setting foot on the ground in his mortal form since he had first left. There was a moment where it was almost too much, darkness and light and gravity all different than what he was used to. There was the sound of the sea, the smell of dust and death and later he would look at the threads of fate to discover just what had happened on the beach that night. At the time, at the moment, all he had eyes for was his family and friends, his sister shining with the literal light of the gods, disbelief warring with the desperate hope on her face.

Vax looked to Scanlan, at his dear old friend, the one who had used all of his magic to save the world from Vecna, and had only regretted that he hadn’t had enough magic to Wish that Vax could stay with them, alive. And now there he was, looking almost afraid, as if he was suddenly aware of the power he wielded.

“Scanlan Shorthalt. You are toying with the designs of the gods still, I see, old friend.” Vax’s voice, his old, mortal voice sounded odd to his own ears after so much time among the dead and with his Queen, speaking as they did.

“Well, I didn’t have a present, so—“ Scanlan smiled even as his voice trembled.

Vax’s lips twitched beneath his mask. Some things had changed, but some things hadn’t. “She will allow it. And thank you.” He lowered the mask then so that he could see them truly, see them well.

“Am I allowed to hug him?” Vex asked, though Vax did not know who she was asking. Then her arms were around him, and his around her, like all the times they had held each other as children when they had felt frightened or sad or alone.

Vax’s heart no longer beat, no longer ached, but that did not mean it could not be filled with gratitude or pride or love. “I am so glad for you.” He looked up at her, at her smile and her tears. There is so much he wanted to say, but there would not be enough time to say it, he knew that. “A child.”

“A little girl,” Vex said through her tears, not knowing that Vax had already known, already seen.

“Like our mother.”

“Yes. Named for her.”

That he had not known, and if he had been able to cry, he might have at that moment.

“I miss you so much.”

“I know,” he said, because what else could he have said? Someday they would be reunited again, but her wedding was not the time to speak of that. Instead he reached up, slowly, and wiped her tears away. “I am no longer worried for you.” The dead could still worry, in their way, but he did not, not for her.

Vax turned to look at Percy, whose clothes looked just as soaked as Vex’s. There was a story there, but not one he had time to hear. “I know the de Rolo family is born anew. Congratulations on this, your first of many blessings, Percival.”

Percy nodded graciously. “Thank you.” He gestured to Vex. “Talk to _her,_ idiot.”

“Don’t be weird! Talk normal!” Vex demanded, and Vax smiled fondly at her. Of course he seemed weird to her now, and she would not understand him if he spoke the way he normally did, in the sighs and whispers of the dead.

“Don’t be worried about me,” he told her, because it would be his only chance to do so. “I am safe and taken care of. I am always with you.” As if it could be otherwise, when they had started life side by side. “You will live. As long as all of your hearts are beating, I will live within them, and my love will never dim.” He looked at her, and it was not just the god’s radiance that made her shine. “How beautiful you look. I am so proud, of all of you.”

“Turn around,” his sister bid him, and he turned to see the ret of them again, and past them even more friends and acquaintances. His gaze fell back to those closest to him, to one in particular.

Keyleth’s hair was a flame to warm his heart and for a moment he could not speak, could not move. It was different, seeing her through half-elven eyes and not the eyes of a raven. He bowed, honor and humor. “Hail to the Tempest.”

Vex smacked him lightly on the shoulder. “Don’t be weird! Go hug her!” As if he needed her to tell him that.

Keyleth smelled like the sea, but also like the sun and like the earth, the same as she always had done. Oh. Oh how he had missed that smell, and the feeling of her arms around him, strong as tree roots. “Hello my love. My home. Zephrah blossoms under your boughs like I knew it would.”

“It’s not the same without you,” Keyleth replied. There were no tears in her eyes, but the sorrow was there in her voice.

“It will not be,” he told her, because it was so. Things changed, that was the truth of it.

“How am I supposed to get over you if you keep sending ravens to me?” She laughed a little, an echo of happier times.

Oh, if she only knew. “I am imperfect, as are the gods.”

“That was my poor attempt at humor. I’ll never get over you.”

Never was a very long time. It was possible that what she said was true, but Vax hoped not. He hoped that someday the pain would lessen for her, that a new love would replace the old, if she wished it.

“Nor I,” he said to her, because for him there would be no new love. “But you will live. And your life will touch thousands.”

“Thanks to you.”

“Your children—“ And there he paused. He had meant all the people of Zephrah when he had said it, but for a moment he couldn’t help but imagine the children they might have had together. It was a fleeting though, but that doesn’t make the ache of its passing any less.

“I’ll watch over hers,” Keyleth replied, nodding towards Vex, and something in the way she said it that maybe she too had thought about the future they would never have together. “And her. For as long as I live.”

That was no small promise. The de Rolo family would have a protector for centuries. He pulled her in closer, trying to engrave the moment and the feel of her forever in his mind. “I am far, but not gone.”

“We know.”

“Forgive me,” he whispered. He had made the only choices he felt he could have made, at the time, but that had not made them easy.

Keyleth shakes her head, her hair brushing his cheek. “There’s nothing to forgive. Nothing. We get to go on because of you. It’s not taken lightly.”

Vax could feel the magic that had brought him here begin to ebb. Nothing lasted forever. A moment more was all he had. He had gotten more time than he had ever thought possible, and he had to be grateful for that. He looked around at the group, at his good and true friends. His family. “Thank you. Live.”

Then he was gone.

———

Vax’ildan walked into the silver mists, through the fog, and when the light turned golden and familiar, it was his own dream he walked into. There was the house he had grown up in. There was Greyskull Keep, the first home he had known after running away from Syngorn with his sister. There were the streets of Emon, familiar and dear to him. There was Whitestone, and Zephrah, there were forests and mountains and seas, all the places he had known joy.

All the dead dreamed perfect dreams. Vax’s dream wasn’t perfect, not yet, not without his family and friends around him. That was all right though. They were not done living. He was not done dreaming.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm angel-ascending on Tumblr and angel_in_ink on Twitter if y'all want to stop by and say hi!


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